The Best American Short Stories 2013 (53 page)

•  “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” came directly out of a dream: in the dream, I got out of bed, went to a (nonexistent) window in our house, looked out, and saw four women suspended between two A-shaped frames on a tiny wire that ran in one side of the head and out the other. The women—who, in my dream-logic, I understood to be poor women from Third World countries—wore matching white smocks, had beautiful long black hair, were alive, and were not in any pain—they were talking happily in the moonlight. And—the kicker—my reaction (that is, the reaction of the guy I was in the dream) was not “Holy shit, what’s going on here?” but “Oh wow, we are so lucky to finally be able to get these for our kids.” That is: pure gratitude. The story then took twelve years to finish.

J
IM
S
HEPARD
is the author of six novels, including, most recently,
Project X
, and four story collections, including
Like You’d Understand, Anyway
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize, and
You Think That’s Bad
, released in 2011. He teaches at Williams College.

•  My mother, who lived through the Great Depression, and my brother are two of the more frugal people you could ever meet, so frugal, in fact, that they enjoy browsing at their local Goodwill, and sometimes I’ll go along, both to spend some time with them and because I occasionally nurse the fantasy that I’ll stumble across some unexpected find when sorting through the dollar books. Ninety-five percent of those book piles are exactly the sort of battered and dispiriting bestsellers and self-help books you’d expect, but the other 5 percent can feature the truly arcane and strange. Out of one such pile, for example, I pulled Sidney Perley’s fantastically bizarre
Historic Storms of New England
, a chronological compendium of eyewitness accounts of the most destructive storms to hit the region, from the first settlements to the late nineteenth century. Nearly all of those accounts, unsurprisingly, were from the point of view of farmers whose entire livelihoods had been threatened by what they’d experienced. The inability to predict such catastrophes—and the sense that you might work hard yet never know what was rolling toward you over the next set of hills—stuck in my imagination for years. I started thinking about writing a story about such a life.

That led to books on nineteenth-century farming, the sort of texts that almost no one in their right mind would check out of a library: things like Jared Van Wagenen Jr.’s
The Golden Age of Homespun
or T. B. Terry’s
Our Farming
. And it was in one of those texts that I came across a forlorn little emotional moment that spawned “The World to Come” in its entirety: a notation in a farm wife’s daily journal that the one friend that she had had in the entire valley, to whom she had been utterly devoted, had been forced to move away. And suddenly a whole vista of desolation and loneliness and foreclosed options seemed to peep forth.

E
LIZABETH
T
ALLENT
teaches in Stanford University’s creative writing program.

•  While I was working on this little essay I called the Word document Wilderness_Explanation, and that was a mistake—I kept opening it, thinking I can’t explain, and closing it. My mistake, but one of those mistakes that reflect flatteringly on the mistaker, since each time the doc winked shut, I felt I had honored some essential obscurity in my relation to the story. I don’t want to take an authoritative stance toward something inexplicable, partly out of fear that if I do, nothing inexplicable will happen to me again as a writer.

So, my none-too-sure guess is that this story began with bewilderment, and that the source of the bewilderment was one of those ordinary, small-scale, recurrent rifts between what you know you feel and what you are willing for others to see. It was this: even with teaching colleagues I know and trust, I’d rather keep my mouth shut than confess to the absorption, connection, and intimacy it’s possible to feel while teaching. Delight regularly figures in my dealings with students, but that delight couldn’t be declared, or it would reflect badly on me. Only, where did that notion come from? I picked it up somewhere. I picked it up everywhere. Teaching is not supposed to be about delight any more than the books on the syllabus are there for delight. I was dissembling about pleasure and whenever there’s dissembling about pleasure, there’s the hint of a story.

Once there was that hint, I began watching for any bits or pieces belonging to the story, for details or phrases or any experience of incongruity that would belong with the other pieces. I liked this because it was a collagelike, collecting way of working whose progression was less like carpentry than like browsing, with browsing’s readiness to like. I might as well have been on a beach looking around for stones that struck me as individuals. That sounds—simple! When I teach, what I want to encourage in young writers is some internalizable Winnicottian/Keatsian willingness to tolerate uncertainties, errors, etc., while they’re working, but my own unwillingness is a problem for me. With this story, for whatever reason, a door opened in perfectionism’s wall. There was also the weird, refracted pleasure of being in the process of writing this story when I’d run into some fresh bewilderment in teaching because I could think, Ah, this is my real life giving me a piece of my fictional life. Which it (my real life) suddenly seemed very happy to do.

Maybe it mattered less, but there was also the grain-of-sand/oyster vexation of fictional professors’ almost always being assholes, with Pnin as the fantastically lovable exception to the rule. In fiction, professor is predatory, student is prey. This ironclad dyad goes to bed without caring much about the intricacy, anxiety, and comedy of teaching. So there’s room.

J
OAN
W
ICKERSHAM
’s most recent book of fiction is
The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story
. Her memoir
The Suicide Index
was a National Book Award finalist. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines as well as in
The Best American Short Stories
and
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
. She also writes a regular op-ed column for the
Boston Globe
, and her pieces often run in the
International Herald Tribune
. She lives with her husband and their two sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

•  A few years ago I got an idea for a story called “The News from Spain.” I never got a chance to write it, and the next time I thought of it, I realized I’d forgotten everything except the title. The loss was maddening but also somehow evocative. And suddenly I imagined a book: a suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories, each of which would be called “The News from Spain.” I wanted the title to feel central to each story and to mean something different in each, but to acquire more resonance—an accrued sense of something deeply felt and elusive, impossible to put into words—as the book went along.

So this is one of those stories. (In the book it, like all the others, is called simply “The News from Spain,” but in order to publish different stories in different magazines I had to differentiate them somehow—hence “The Tunnel.”) I wrote it soon after my mother had gone to live in a nursing home; her physical condition was dire but her mind was still sharp. And our relationship was prickly but close.

Rebecca’s romantic history has nothing to do with mine. But the central love story here, between the mother and the daughter, was pretty much a straightforward example of “Write what you know,” which I always amend to read, “Write what matters to you.”

C
ALLAN
W
INK
’s stories have appeared in
Granta, The New Yorker, Ecotone
, and others. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

•  This story, especially the setting, stems largely from the farm of one of my childhood friends. I would go there on the weekends and we would just run wild around the place—play in the barns, climb the hay, etc.

Once, I saw a cat, a small calico, dead on a pile of manure that was going to be spread on the fields. I think, in large part, this story developed as some sort of justification for this image, one that twenty years later I still can picture very clearly.

A
LMOND
,
S
TEVE

Gondwana.
Ploughshares
, vol. 38, no. 1.

A
PPEL
, J
ACOB
M.

The Price of Storks.
Western Humanities Review
, vol. 66, no. 2.

B
AKER
, M
ATTHEW

Everything That Somehow Found Us Here.
New England Review
, vol. 33, no. 2.

B
ARRETT
, A
NDREA

The Particles.
Tin House
, no. 51.

B
EAMS
, C
LARE

World’s End.
One Story
, no. 166.

B
EATTIE
, A
NN

The Astonished Woodchopper.
Paris Review
, no. 201.

B
ERGMAN
, M
EGAN
Mayhew

Phoenix.
Ploughshares Pshares Singles
, no. 3.

B
LACK
, A
LETHEA

You, on a Good Day.
One Story
, no. 163.

B
OSWELL
, R
OBERT

American Epiphany.
American Short Fiction
, vol. 15, no. 54.

Boyle, T. Coraghessan

Birnam Wood.
The New Yorker
, September 3.

B
RADLEY
, D
AVID

You Remember the Pin Mill.    
Narrative Magazine
, Spring
.

B
ROWN
, K
AREN

Stillborn.
Epoch
, vol. 61, no. 2.

C
ARLSON
, R
ON

Line from a Movie.
Zyzzyva
, no. 96.

C
ELONA
, M
ARJORIE

The Everpresent Hell of Other People.
Harvard Review
, no. 42.

C
HABON
, M
ICHAEL

Citizen Conn.
The
New Yorker
, February 13 & 20.

C
LARK
, G
EORGE
M
AKANA

The Incomplete Priest.
Ecotone
, no. 114.

C
OOPER
, R
AND
Richards

Tunneling.
Commonweal
, July
.

C
ORE
, L
EOPOLDINE

The Underside of Charm.
Joyland
, vol. 1, no. 2.

C
REWS
, H
ARRY

You’ll Like My Mother’s Grave.    
Georgia Review
, vol. 66, no. 3.

D
AHLIE
, M
ICHAEL

The Pharmacist from Jena.
Harper’s Magazine
, January.

D
ARK
, A
LICE
E
LLIOT

Rumm Road.
The Literarian
, no. 7
.

D
E
J
ARNATT
, S
TEVE

Mulligan.
Cincinnati Review
, vol. 8, no. 2.

D
EWILLE
, J
AMES

Last Days on Rossmore.
American Short Fiction
, vol. 15, no. 55.

D
ÍAZ
, J
UNOT

The Cheater’s Guide to Love.
The New Yorker
, July 23.

D
ONOGHUE
, E
MMA

Onward.
The Atlantic
, September.

D
UVAL
, P
ETE

Orchard Tender.
Meridian
, no. 28.

E
DOCHIE
, C
HIDELIA

The King of Hispaniola.
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 51, no. 1.

E
GAN
, J
ENNIFER

Black Box.
The New Yorker
, June 4 & 11.

E
LLIOTT
, J
ULIA

LIMBs.
Tin House
, no. 51.

E
RDRICH
, L
OUISE

Nero.
The New Yorker
, May 7.

F
RISCH
, S
ARAH

Housebreaking.
Paris Review
, no. 203.

G
ALCHEN
, R
IVKA

Appreciation.
The New Yorker
,    March 19.

G
ENI
, A
BBY

Dharma at the Gate.
Glimmer Train
, no. 83.

G
ILSON
, W
ILLIAM

At the Dark End of the Street.
New England Review
, vol. 33, no. 1.

G
ROFF
, L
AUREN

Abundance.
Ecotone
, no. 13.

A Season by the Shore.
Glimmer Train
, no. 82.